Exempted from antitrust laws in the early twentieth century, and often subsidized by public money, major-league baseball proved long ago to be highly profitable for team owners—who, the sportscaster and all-around smart thinker Bob Costas once remarked, “by and large, are soulless and incompetent.”

Few cinematic owners have been as soulless as the onetime exotic dancer played by Margaret Whitton in Major League, who steps in for her incompetent—and now dead—husband with a nefarious plot to bring down the once-mighty Cleveland Indians. David Ward’s altogether pleasing film, released in 1989, features players who would come into their own in later years: Dennis Haysbert as a Vodou-practicing smasher of a batter, Charlie Sheen as a pitcher late of the California Penal League, Wesley Snipes as the base-stealing master of disaster Willie Mays Hayes, and Tom Berenger as a wise, world-weary catcher. (In baseball films, all catchers are wise and world-weary.) The performances are note-perfect, and the setting is heartbreaking, that being Tucson, Arizona, where I live, from which the Indians have long been absent, along with most of the rest of pro baseball, thanks to soulless and incompetent owners and politicians.